Exxon Still Sponsoring Deniers

Photo by futureatlas.com, <a href="http://www.flickr.com/photos/87913776@N00/2540266876/">via Flickr</a>.

Fight disinformation: Sign up for the free Mother Jones Daily newsletter and follow the news that matters.


ExxonMobil is still funding groups that deny climate change, despite claiming last year that it had stopped doing so.

Reports the Independent:

Free-market, anti-climate change think-tanks such as the Atlas Economic Research Foundation in the US and the International Policy Network in the UK have received grants totalling hundreds of thousands of pounds from the multinational energy company ExxonMobil. Both organisations have funded international seminars pulling together climate change deniers from across the globe.

Josh Harkinson reported on Atlas‘s role in the international climate change denier web in December, and Exxon topped our list of climate deniers in December. In fact, they’ve been the top source of climate-change-denier funding for some time, as  Chris Mooney reported for Mother Jones in 2005. Exxon gave Atlas $100,000 in 2008, according to the oil company’s reports, and Atlas has in turn supported at least 30 other foreign think-tanks that spread climate change misinformation. A number of these groups have been at the forefront of efforts to flog the so-called ClimateGate issue, and are now leading assaults on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

ExxonMobil’s response? “We have the same concerns as people everywhere—and that is how to provide the world with the energy it needs while reducing greenhouse gas emissions,” the company said in a statement to the Independent. Yes, ExxonMobil, the fossil fuel-giant, is just like “people everywhere.”

 

Fact:

Mother Jones was founded as a nonprofit in 1976 because we knew corporations and billionaires wouldn't fund the type of hard-hitting journalism we set out to do.

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

Fact:

Today, reader support makes up about two-thirds of our budget, allows us to dig deep on stories that matter, and lets us keep our reporting free for everyone. If you value what you get from Mother Jones, please join us with a tax-deductible donation today so we can keep on doing the type of journalism 2022 demands.

payment methods

We Recommend

Latest

Sign up for our free newsletter

Subscribe to the Mother Jones Daily to have our top stories delivered directly to your inbox.

Get our award-winning magazine

Save big on a full year of investigations, ideas, and insights.

Subscribe

Support our journalism

Help Mother Jones' reporters dig deep with a tax-deductible donation.

Donate